Digital currency or coins have brought about a new investment hype. There is a lot of money circulating in this industry such that you can easily make massive profits, in a short span or serious losses in the same span. Bitcoin and Ethereum are the most popular cryptocurrency with great potential, but of late, other coins referred to as altcoins have been developed. Having multiple coins give investors a wider pool for investment. It is important to note that cryptocurrencies are extremely volatile, thus, you need to be very cautious when investing. Here are 4 ways in which you can invest in this industry.

1. Cryptocurrency Mining

Mining is one of the ways in which you can invest in cryptocurrency. It involves solving complex cryptographic problems using specialized mining machines to earn coins. You can then sell these coins on various exchanges for fiat currency or make online payments. You need specialized mining equipment which you can find at crypto drilling to mine profitably. Ensure that you also identify highly liquid coins so that you can sell them easily after you mine them successfully.

2. You Can Buy and Hold

Like stocks and other commodities, you can also speculate on digital currency. About eight years ago, Bitcoin was less than $100. In just a few years, the coin had shot to more than $1000, at one point reaching a high of $20,000. Those who had bought and kept the coin while it was still below the $100 mark made a substantial amount of money. There are many more other coins apart from Bitcoin that have shown potential for growth. The best investment strategy is to buy different coins and diversify your portfolio, thus, spreading your risk. In case some coins lose value, they can be covered by the rest in your portfolio.

3. Buy from an Exchange and not from Brokers

Buying and selling coins will involve paying fees to exchanges and brokers. You can avoid these fees and increase your profit margin. Try and look for exchanges that request for low fees but also check for their reputation. It is very easy to get scammed if you fail to carry out due diligence. Avoid buying these coins from brokers as they charge a substantially high fee. Brokers pose a greater risk of getting scammed as compared to crypto exchanges.

4. Long and Short Selling

If you are looking for immediate returns, you can either go long or short a particular cryptocurrency. Taking long position is betting on the value of a particular digital currency going up, while going short is betting on the value going down. Considering the volatility nature of most cryptocurrencies, there are usually massive fluctuations in prices that can earn you handsome profits if a trade favors your position. There are various trading sites that now list major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether with some enabling leverage trading. Be aware that you can as well make significant losses if the position you place goes against you.

What is airdrop

If you are into cryptocurrency I'm sure you must have heard about airdrops. And you are someone new then you might probably thing what is an airdrop. During natural disaster, war time airdrops are carried out to provide essential supplies to people trapped in those area. But in cryptocurrency airdrop have a totally different meaning and today we will see what exactly is an airdrop and how we can make money from cryptocurrency airdrops . Yes you can make a lot of money by airdrops so keep reading.

Airdrop in cryptocurrency world means distribution of cryptocurrency tokens to the wallets of some users for free. These are mostly done up new tokens.

How cryptocurrency Airdrop works ?

There are basically two types of airdrops, one where the tokens are distributed to all the wallets and one where you need to perform some task in order to get some tokens. Most of the time a company will announce their airdrop in their website and ask their users to do certain task like sharing about their project in social media, or inviting their friends to join the airdrop etc.

After you perform their task then they will give you their tokens which might be of worth $5- $10 etc. You might say that it is a very low amount but once the project grows you value too increases. For example few months back a company did an airdrop . Initially its value was low but after few days their airdrop value was more than $2000. Yes that’s the power Airdrop.

Reasons for carrying out an airdrop

There are a lot of reasons why companies does airdrops. It can be for creating hype around their new project which is very much needed if they are doing an ICO or may be to reward their loyal customers.

Here are some of the reasons why companies carry out cryptocurrency airdrops

1. As a Reward for Loyal Customers
2. To Generate Lead Database
3. To Create Awareness About a New Cryptocurrency
4. Promotion in the Community

How to take part in airdrops

Now here comes the important part. How to exactly take part in cryptocurrency airdrops ? Here is a step by step guide on how you can join airdrops and what are the things that you need to have.

1. An Ethereum Wallet: The wallet cannot be one that is on an exchange. It has to be a personal address that is ERC20 compatible because most of the tokens that are airdropped are ERC20 tokens, which are or were originally Ethereum-based ICOs. I suggest using MetaMask or MyEtherWallet to get started immediately, but in the long-term I always recommend getting a hardware wallet like the Ledger Nano S.

2. A Telegram Account : I’m sure there are amazing reasons why Telegram is the chatting tool of choice for many of these ICOs. The coins want to boost the audience count. Usually, these airdrop coins will also require you to sign up for their Telegram accounts. Until you receive the coin in your Ethereum wallet, do not leave the Telegram accounts or you risk disqualification for the airdrop.

3. A Twitter Account : Similar to the reasons behind the Telegram account, many of the airdrop coins will also require you to follow them on Twitter. Some of them will even ask you to retweet some tweet.

4. An email address : Sometimes airdrops will ask for your email, too. If you don’t feel comfortable with giving them your real email, just create a spam one. Remember the password, though; some of them actually ask you to confirm your email.

Airdrops are a great way to make some money without much of work. You never know which token will rise and give you good returns so it is advisable to join many airdrops.

Bonus

If you have made it till the end then i'm sure you are fully interested in airdrops and want to join one. So you might be asking how to know know which tokens are doing airdrops ? So we at TheCoinmill have created a telegram channel where we share updates related to airdrops, cryptocurrency news etc daily. Go join it. : t.me/thecoinmill

I have been investing ( wasting ) a lot of time in understanding crypto currency and everything involved with it. Yes by now i know the meaning of HODL, FUD, FOMO etc. Also I ended up creating a facebook group called : TheCoinMill where we help people get started with crypto currency.

After getting involved in it for few months call i can say is that in 2018 ICOs ( Initial Coin Offerings ) will become the next big thing and why not ? its beneficial for companies to get started by getting crowd fund and also it is beneficial for investors too. Here in ICOs anyone can invest from as little as $10 to and amount that you can afford.

Here are the details of few ICOs which gave excellent Returns in 2017 :

1. WABI - almost 21 times reutns in about 1 month. Means if you would have invested Rs 10,000 you would have got Rs 2.1 lacs in 1 month

2. ICON - 100 times returns in 3 months. Do the calculation yourself.

Now because of all these reasons a lot of people are getting into ICOs as it is quick money ( most of the time ). I agree there are lot of scams going on in the name of ICO but these days we have experts who help people choose the genuine one.

One such ICO was Experty ICO. Here is a video which explains what they are trying to do

Now this ICO is a genuine one with an excellent team and roadmap. They have their sale on 31st January and they have a goal to rise $10,000,000. They earned a good reputation in the market and got around 20,000 members in their official telegram group.

But something terrible happened last night. Hackers hacked their server and they got access to details of all the participants who whitelisted to their ICO.

The Impact

Generally when we take part in ICOs we need to first whitelist our-self where we need to give our name, email ID, password, ETH address where we will receive the tokens, Passport copy etc

When experty's website got hacked hackers got all the above mentioned details of all participants. Today they started sending mails to all the registered participants where they asked them to send their ETH to a specific address in order to take part in ICO. This address belonged to the Hacker and not Experty. Most of the participants believed it as it looked genuine and everyone started sending ETH to this address.

email with ETH address sent by the hacker to participants

In the last 12 hours the address ( hacker's address ) received almost 108 ETH which is almost $120,000

This is something we really need to worry about. As ICOs are getting popular, a lot of scammers and hackers are getting into it as it is easy to scam people here. The biggest problem is that all these transactions happens in cryptocurrencies so it is almost impossible to catch the hacker and this is the reason why many scams takes place.

Also Companies doing ICOs should take these things seriously because it is seen that most of the time their sites are not that secure . They aim to get million dollars from ICOs but don't spend money in security and other stuffs. We have seen during TheKey ICO how they fail to handle traffic during the sale and their website was down for more than 10 hours during the sale. People give away their personal details like copy of passport, phone number etc so if these information are compromised then people might face a lot of trouble in future.